We later drove to see Tootsie Tomblin, a younger sister to Jake and a neighbor on Big Branch. Tootsie greeted us at the door, flanked by her tall husband Clabe, and a small nut-cracking housedog that barked at our every movement — even after we’d sat down at a large eating table in the dining room.

Tootsie referred to Ed Haley as “Uncle Ed” and said her whole family loved him. She said he was “a great person…so understanding.” Ed was particularly close to her mother, Nary Dalton.

“Ed thought the world of my mother. He thought my mother was the finest woman he had ever laid his eyes on. And he’d tell her, he’d say, ‘Come over here Nary and set down beside me. I want to talk to you a little bit.’ And he’d tell her everything about hisself, and about his wife, his children and everything. He loved her cooking.”

Tootsie laughed.

“Daddy had a whole litter of kids and we all had nicknames but Mommy insisted on calling us by our real names. And Ed, being blind, couldn’t figure out why there were so many kids in the home. He called for Mom. ‘Hey Nary, come in here and set down beside of me.’ Mom went to him and said, ‘What are you a wanting, Ed?’ He said, ‘I’ve listened for three or four days and I’m kind of buffaloed.’ She said, ‘What are you buffaloed on?’ Ed said, ‘You got too many kids. All of these names don’t add up. What are we a doing with all these names?’ Mom laughed and then explained it to him.”

Before we could ask Tootsie any more questions, she showed us several small boxes of old family photographs while feeding us donuts, pie and milk. I asked her if she remembered much about Ed coming to her father’s house.

“They was a funny family of people,” she said. “I mean, they had peculiar ways. They was different. Them people went clean as pins. You never seen them dirty. Ed could take care of them good as I could mine and me with eyes. When Ed spoke, he spoke with authority. They knew he meant what he was saying. He’d say, ‘Now, that’s enough,’ and that was it. He never had to whip his kids.”

Tootsie said Ed mostly visited Dood at his first home (“Jake’s place”) and never brought his wife with him. Later, after her father built his new house in 1951 (her current home), Ed only came a time or two. On his last trip, he had a Jacob Stainer or a Stradivarius violin with him.

“He was here in the fall and died the next summer or maybe that winter,” she said. “One of his boys brought him here.”

When Ed was in Harts, he traveled a lot with Jeff Mullins, a simple-minded man and brother to Aunt Liza who stayed with the Adams family. In Logan, he played with his wife or a colored man.

I asked Tootsie if she remembered a lot about how her father played the fiddle. She said she was sure that he played with the fiddle under his chin. Some of his tunes were “Cacklin’ Hen”, “Wednesday Night Waltz”, and “Bear Dog” — basically what Ed played. He could also play a little on the guitar and sing. Tootsie really bragged on Ed’s singing — like his “Coming Around the Mountain” — and kind of caught us off guard when she said, “Buddy, Ed Haley could dance. He was a chubby fellow but he could move. That old man could move.”

After talking for some time about Ed’s music, our conversation drifted toward his family on Harts Creek.

“Old man Peter Mullins, everybody called him ‘Reel-foot Peter’ cause he had his foot cut off here and had a special shoe made,” Joe said, referencing Ed’s uncle. “He walked kindly on his heel. He worked on log jobs but he couldn’t do much. He gathered ginseng. He made most of his money on moonshine. He hauled it up to Black Bottom in Logan and sold it. He liked to drink. They drunk moonshine most of the time. They were good old people.”

Now would Ed drink a lot with Uncle Peter when he was around Harts?

“Old man Ed every now and then he’d take a few drinks of it,” Joe said. “I’ve seen him pretty high. It didn’t take much of that moonshine to get in your hair. I’ve seen it just as clear as a crystal. You could look through the bottle just like looking right on in a looking glass and you could shake it and about seven beads’d pop up there on top of it and they’d just roll around and around. And you couldn’t smell it. I’ve seen some that you’d look at and it’d look like muddy water and you could smell it through the bottles. But they made good whiskey. They generally made it out of chop or corn and if they’d double it back and use good clear water it was good. You could just turn it up and it wouldn’t take your breath.”

Brandon asked what Ed was like when he was “feeling high” and Joe said, “He seemed like he was in a good mood about all the time. When I was around him I never did hear him say nothing out of the way to nobody. Old man Ed, he was a fine old man but he got over here at a beer garden. Clifford Belcher had a beer garden on this mountain — it was the meanest place that ever was — and he was over there playing one night and they was a big bunch of them a playing cards and the law come in to arrest them all. Some of them boys jumped out the window. And Ed got into it with somebody in there and they said that fellow said something and Ed just come over and took that fiddle by the neck and busted it all to pieces over that fellow’s head. I don’t know what he said to him but I come along there after it happened. They arrested a whole bunch of them fellows and put them in a cattle truck, the state police did, and took them to jail. They was about fifteen or twenty of them. They was Geronie Adams and Virgil Farley and Frank Farley. They loaded them up and hauled them to Logan and them fellows a cussing. They said, ‘You just might as well keep quiet. You’re going to jail.’ I think they took Ed to jail, too.”

Brandon said he’d heard several old-timers talk about how people used to play jokes on Ed when he was at Trace and Joe agreed.

“They played all kinds of tricks on him,” he said. “They was an old man stayed up here, old man Jeff Mullins. He was Peter’s wife’s brother. They called him dumb, but now he wasn’t as dumb as they thought he was. He stayed up there when Ed and them was up there and they was all the time playing pranks on Ed and him. Tennis Mullins, Ewell’s boy, he was big and fat and he run the store all the time. He was all the time fooling with Ed and old man Jeff.”

I asked how Ed took it when people joked with him and Joe said, “He was good about it. He never got mad. I know up there one time they was out there at old man Peter’s where they was a bridge there and they was a bunch of trees there. And old man Ewell Mullins, he was all the time fooling with Ed. He told Ed, he said, ‘We’ll climb a tree here to the top and let them cut it down.’ Well, Ed couldn’t see. Ewell, he climbed up the first limb about ten feet high and said, ‘Cut ‘er down boys!’ He jumped off about the time it started to fall. And Ed climbed right in the top of it. I bet he was forty feet up there. And they cut it and it fell and skinned him all over and liked to killed him. Ewell never would tell him though that he was just up a little bit on the tree.”

Joe said he also remembered Ed’s uncle Ticky George Adams.

“The old man as far as I know he never did work on no public works of no kind or draw no release or nothing,” he said. “He kept his family… He went from house to house — and everybody raised all kind of stuff and had cattle and plenty of milk and butter and eggs and everything — and every place he stopped they give him something. He had a little pole on his back with a sack on it. You’d see him a going bent over just kindly in a long run. He’d go up Trace and go through the head of Trace. And old man George would go around that a way and come down Rockhouse by Will Farley’s and back up through my Uncle Sewell’s and Aunt Alice’s down here. Everybody’d give him something. They’d give him a stick of butter or give him some milk or give him some meat or give him some eggs or something another. That’s the way he raised his family. Those Hoover times was hard.”